Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 383ethnolinguistics (also neo-Humboldtianism)Collective term for anthropological and linguistic investigations into the connectionsbetween language and ethnically based, sociocultural aspects of the given linguisticcommunity. Most work in ethnolinguistics can be traced to the linguistic philosophy ofWilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) ( energeia).ReferencesBasilius, H. 1952. Neo-Humboldtian ethnolinguistics. Word 8. 95–105.Miller, R.L. 1968. The linguistic relativity principle and Humboldtian ethnolinguistics: a historyand appraisal. The Hague.ethnography of speaking, Sapir-Whorf hypothesisethnomethodological conversation analysisconversation analysisethnomethodologyAn area of research in interpretative sociology initiated by H.Garfinkel concerned withthe analysis of formal properties of practical reasoning. It investigates the activitieswhereby members of a sociocultural community produce and manage settings for theireveryday lives. These activities are considered to be identical to those which membersuse to make settings ‘accountable’ (i.e. observable, reportable, and interpretable forthemselves and others). Ethnomethodology assumes that members make sense out oftheir actions by interpreting them against a background of underlying patterns, i.e. theytake certain shared commonsense knowledge for granted. One way of finding out aboutsuch tacit knowledge that members rely on are ‘quasi-experiments’ designed to disruptthose patterns and induce a break in the subject’s background expectancies. For instance,some students were asked to have an acquaintance explain the meaning of an utterance:Subject (waving cheerfully to experimenter): How are you? —Experimenter: How am Iwith regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my…?Subject (red in the face and suddenly out of control): Look, I was just trying to be polite.Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are (Garfinkel 1967). Following Schuetz (1961–2),Garfinkel proposes a number of strategies that members use to make sense out of theiractions, such as the retrospective and prospective interpretation of activities (see also